by Alan Paul
I had landed in a better place after sacrificing for Rebecca’s career. Seventeen years into our relationship, it once again felt like time to shut my eyes and make a leap of faith.
We had not said a word about China to our children. We wanted to wait until we were certain. Then we called a family meeting, sitting together in a circle on our front lawn. Becky and I had rehearsed our pitch, wanting to make sure that they saw it as a grand family adventure.
We showed them the pictures we had carefully taken for exactly this purpose, focusing on seven-year-old Jacob; the other two would surely follow his lead. We began with the photos of Fundazzle’s monstrous ball pit.
“I want to go to China!” he exclaimed.
The kids were in.
To help anchor my own work life, I wanted to maintain my associations with Slam and Guitar World, because it scared me to have nothing. The Slam editors were interested in occasional reports on Chinese players and even agreed to write a letter opening a Beijing bureau, with me as its chief, which would establish me as a legally credentialed journalist in China.
Guitar World was equally accommodating. Over lunch, editor Brad Tolinski said he was happy to continue our working relationship, which had already spanned fifteen years.
“You can keep working for us as long as you’re willing to make the time difference your burden and not anyone else’s,” Brad said, over a cheeseburger at a diner near the magazine’s office. “And as long as you still want to work for us.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have a feeling you’ll find a world of opportunity over there,” he said. “You could be the guy who brings the Allman Brothers to the Great Wall. Who knows what you might end up doing?”
A few months after that nerve-racking flight home, Becky and I were headed back to Beijing, with Jacob, Eli, and Anna buckled in beside us.
I had anticipated that boarding a plane to China with one-way tickets would engender panic, but I felt only relief. Whatever difficulties the transition posed would pale in comparison to the painstaking process of emptying our house and putting our lives in Maplewood on ice.
That had proven to be surprisingly exhausting, like an archaeological dig that became geometrically more difficult as it neared completion. We had sorted our entire house, crammed full from seven years of pack-rat existence, into various piles. We threw away and donated mounds of goods, filled a crate for storage, selected the precious goods we wanted sent in an air shipment that would arrive in two weeks and slapped “sea shipment” stickers on everything else we wanted to move. That would all be loaded onto a sixty-foot container on our little dead-end street and board a literal slow boat to China, arriving two months later.
We also had to clean and prep the house for tenants, and we made it all more difficult by spending two weeks driving around the country on a farewell tour of family and friends. Bending under the stress, I gained ten pounds and resorted to sleeping pills for the first time in my life.
By the day before we left, we were all coming undone. We had moved in across the street with my remarkably accommodating aunt Joan and uncle Ben, dragging everything we were taking to China in a half-dozen “body bag” duffels I bought at an army/navy store. When Ben suggested they might be too big to meet airline regulations, I visited Continental’s website and realized that we were indeed way over the size limit. That led to a frenzied shopping trip to Target and a complete repacking.
That evening, Joan walked into her house, looked around at her living room, so covered with our belongings that it looked like a tractor trailer had exploded, and burst out laughing. I appreciated her good humor and tried to share it, but we were beyond frazzled. All this stuff that once seemed crucial now looked like a random, schizoid collection: six pounds of Peet’s coffee and a French press; a pharmacy’s worth of Motrin, Tylenol, Imodium, shampoo, and contact lens solution; a collection of dolls and stuffed animals; board games; DVDs; clothes; photo albums. It seemed demented to drag so much stuff to China, but this was no time for second thoughts. We shoved everything into the twelve new bags.
It was exhilarating to have all that behind us. The plane was like a meditation chamber where no one could reach us, and we finally had some time to gather our thoughts. I didn’t even allow the flight attendant’s chiding for having too many things for the children to bother me.
We somehow survived the fourteen-hour flight, much of it spent trying to get Anna to sleep. As the plane finally approached Beijing, I looked out the window at the jagged brown mountains and did a double take; the Great Wall was clearly visible, snaking across the top of the imposing ridges. Sitting by the window with Anna, I excitedly called the boys over. All four of us pressed our faces against the windows.
“Yep,” Jacob said. “That’s China all right.”
For the rest of the descent, Anna continually pointed out the window and said, “That China.”
Chapter 3
Across the Great Divide
Our strangest initial adjustment was getting used to Beijing Riviera, the walled compound where the Journal owned a house. It was the kind of place where we would never have chosen to reside in the United States, with manicured streets and houses that looked so similar that Rebecca and I both repeatedly got lost trying to find our home in the first days.
The Singaporean-owned Riviera has more than four hundred large homes painted in muted pastel peaches and yellows. They were all loaded with patios and roof decks that may have made sense in Singapore but were nonsensical in Beijing’s harsh winters and dusty, polluted summers. The interiors featured a marble-infused grandiosity, as if Chinese architects had watched soap operas to determine what Western homes should look like. The compound had an overriding country club feel, with a large clubhouse, a gym, and indoor and outdoor pools.
The whole place was hidden from the outside world by cement walls patrolled by a platoon of guards clad in crisp, military-style uniforms. They looked intimidating until you realized that they were just kids, fresh-faced teens newly arrived from China’s hinterlands, many sprouting their first tentative mustaches. They all seemed almost scared of us.
Though well inside Beijing’s huge municipal borders, Riviera was ten miles from the central city, twice as close as Maplewood is from downtown Manhattan. But our neighborhood was no Maplewood. The city was actually more readily available—you could get anywhere downtown for a $10 cab ride. But it felt far more remote, because the countryside began just outside the compound walls. I enjoyed riding my new bike down rutted half-dirt roads, past greenhouses surrounded by plywood shanties where migrant workers streaming toward Beijing from rural provinces lived, tending vegetable gardens on minuscule plots; no area was too small to hold a plant or vine. Toddlers waddled through it all with their bare bottoms exposed through pants split in two—no need for diapers when you can go anywhere without even pulling down your pants.
Spending so much time on my bike took me back to a far simpler time in life: my Pittsburgh childhood. I recalled a similar thrill of exploration and sense of open-ended possibility during days spent cruising the neighborhood looking for baseball games, trees to climb, or friends to run through backyards with.
It was jolting to travel through rural China and then ride back through the gates into Riviera’s serene, Stepford-like calm. The compound was simultaneously a non-Chinese bubble and a paradigm of Chinese living, with the guards and street maids who kept the sidewalks and gutters clean with archaic twig brooms. There was a constant buzz of motorized tricycles delivering groceries and giant water bottles to homes as well as the supplies that fueled endless construction as one home after another was gutted and redone.
Hundreds of day laborers lined up outside the walls to be signed in every day at 9:00 a.m. Late in the afternoon, they filed out of the compound, covered in grime, walking shoulder to shoulder under the guards’ vigilant eyes.
The very existen
ce of places like the Riv was news to me before we made that look-see visit. I had assumed we would be living in a small apartment in the city center, but we ended up with a house that was larger than our place in New Jersey. Riviera was almost ten years old when we arrived, one of the oldest such compounds.
We lived in an area heavy with these places, and Beijing Riviera was a typical name, joined by Capital Paradise, Lemon Lake, River Garden, Legend Garden, Yosemite—pronounced Yo-Sum-Ite by the Europeans—Chateau Regalia, Dynasty Garden, and the immortal Merlin Champagne Town. The large international schools were all nearby, and the compounds still catered largely to expats, though more and more wealthy Chinese were also moving in. The newer developments tended to have even larger, fancier houses, including some with indoor pools.
Many of these places were located a few miles north of us off the busy Jing Shun Lu (Road), a dusty, bustling road where you were equally likely to encounter speeding Audis with blackened windows, shepherds herding flocks of tattered sheep, or mule-drawn wagons weighed down with bricks. Traversing that made arriving at the newer, fancier compounds feel like landing on a moon colony, distant, isolated outposts of a foreign culture.
All these compounds provided a strange, hermetic environment where you might hear a dozen languages being spoken but could get along just fine with English. Our newly arrived kids didn’t notice any of this; they seemed to feel like they were on a Florida vacation, with a pool to splash in and countless kids to play with.
The Journal’s deputy bureau chief, Kathy Chen, was like our guardian angel, even having stocked our kitchen with milk, juice, Diet Coke, and a $12 box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. An American-born Chinese who had spent fifteen of the past twenty years in greater China, Kathy had a deep understanding of both the country and the expat scene. She patiently answered our endless questions and steered us through daily life. Just as importantly, our kids were almost identically aged and they immediately became close friends.
Living in a service apartment while our house was being repaired, we did not have a washer or dryer so I dropped our dirty clothes off at the clubhouse laundry service. I was confused when I picked it up the next day and was charged almost $50. When I got home, I realized that everything had been dry-cleaned instead of laundered. The sight of my kids’ tiny tighty whities, T-shirts, and sports shorts hanging stiffly starched on hangers, tags stapled on the labels, made me laugh out loud.
The idea of moving my family to China, which seemed so radical back in New Jersey, now appeared to be anything but. I stood around the compound playgrounds, watching a veritable United Nations of children playing together. Our most exotic traits were our gender reversal—my wife was off working while I was patrolling the swings with a host of mothers and Chinese ayis (nannies)—and the mere fact that we were such expat rookies. “Where was your previous posting?” was a common opening question upon meeting someone. I usually answered with one word: “Jersey.”
We felt a great sense of relief when our picky little Jacob put on his new uniform for the British Dulwich College of Beijing with no complaints. He had often refused to wear anything that didn’t feel exactly right, and all our anxiety about moving to China had been channeled into the looming need to dictate his clothing. We knew we were going to be okay when he got dressed without a hitch; seeing him and Eli run on to the luxurious coach that served as their school bus on the first day without looking back brought tears to Becky’s eyes.
Alone every morning, as Rebecca immersed herself in a demanding, intimidating new position and the kids headed to school, I quickly realized that I needed to stay on the move. I started making exploratory rides around the area on my new mountain bike, often ending up at a nearby Starbucks, which I turned into my office, checking e-mail and writing blog posts. I embraced my new anonymity, feeling that it represented a profound opportunity to hit the reboot button on my life.
It felt like we had stepped through a looking glass or fallen through a rabbit hole and emerged in a parallel universe on the other side of the world. With my wife and kids occupied and everybody else I knew sixty-eight hundred miles away, I was free to explore. It felt like I was winking at life and getting away with something. I was energized by the raw thrill of being enmeshed in two new worlds: Beijing and Expat Land.
I met an eight-year-old girl whose mother was Indian and father Dutch but who had never lived anywhere but Beijing. Eli became good friends with a five-year-old British girl with a perfect English accent who was born and raised in Hong Kong. At one school assembly, the principal asked how many kids spoke four languages and about 20 percent raised their hands. All this would soon seem normal, but it amazed me in those early days. Back home, I was a pretty worldly guy; now I felt like I had just fallen off the turnip truck. It took me most of the year to quit assuming that every five-year-old with a proper British accent knew more than me.
I also quickly learned that in Expat Land I was a “trailing spouse,” a term I found demeaning for anyone and downright emasculating for a man. This wasn’t all new to me. I had not set foot in an office for a decade, and as our kids’ primary caregiver I was used to being the only adult male in a room, having chaperoned field trips, helped kindergartners cut and paste, and been surrounded by mothers at countless midday assemblies.
But the dividing line was much sharper in Expat Land. We had uprooted our family and moved to the other side of the world for someone’s job, and it was not mine. I also had a certain cool cachet back home, as the guy who wrote about music and basketball and didn’t have to shave. Now I was just the dad without a job.
Fellow expats were not the only ones unsure what to make of me. The company driver, Mr. Dou, had to get used not only to having a lady boss, but also to having a male tai tai (lady of the house). Like most people in his position, Mr. Dou was at first an intimidating presence, a former military man who was as much a fixer as a driver. He was loyal, efficient, and well skilled in manipulating the Chinese bureaucracy. It felt good to have him on our side.
He picked us up at the airport on day one, and we spent a lot of time together during our first weeks as he ferried us around on the bureaucratic errands necessary for setting up a life—processing visas, getting press credentials, applying for driver’s licenses.
One day he took me alone to the massive police station in central Beijing where visas were issued for foreigners and Chinese alike. We were there to secure long-term visas for my kids and me. My journalist credentials as Slam’s first Beijing bureau chief had been received from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and were attached to my application.
This was my first visit to the office, and the long lines of people waiting behind rows of deskbound, uniformed officers intimidated me. Mr. Dou walked directly to the front of the line and dropped our papers in front of an officious-looking cop, but no one objected. The officer took the papers, began reading through them, and marked every other page with a chop, the ink stamps without which nothing is official in China. Suddenly, he stopped chopping and looked up at me. I braced myself, wondering what the problem was.
He smiled and said, in halting English “I very like Slam.”
As a Slam senior writer for a decade. I knew that the magazine had die-hard readers who considered it a basketball bible. But I did not realize how far its reach extended. I thanked him, and he asked, “Who do you think is best Chinese basketball player, after Yao Ming?”
I had no idea, so I told a partial truth: “That’s what I’m here to find out.”
Mr. Dou watched us with the shocked expression of someone listening to cats chatting. After he and the officer had an animated discussion, Mr. Dou looked at me and chuckled. Something had changed in the way he regarded me. I had earned some face.
I was happy to gain stature in Mr. Dou’s eyes, but I was having too much fun to care much what anyone thought. For the past ten years I had juggled assignments for Slam and Guitar World with domestic respons
ibilities. Liberated from deadlines and with no immediate economic need to hustle for work, I poured myself into my new blog. I initially viewed it as merely a means of keeping in touch with friends and family, but I quickly realized that keeping this public journal—posting photos and tales about our new life—was transforming me, reigniting my passion for writing.
I began to treat the blog as a job, compelled to make daily postings. Writing so much for no money represented the economic emancipation that expat living offered, thanks to subsidized housing in a place where everything else cost radically less.
Back in the United States, it felt like we were on a treadmill, struggling to bring in as much as we spent, even as our salaries rose. Now I was free to follow my muse, writing thousands of words a day just to tell the story I wanted to tell.
Just before graduating from college, I self-published a book of satirical columns I had written for the Michigan Daily under the pseudonym Fat Al. In a short introduction, I wrote, “If you can’t do it with passion, don’t do it.” I had tried to continue living by that creed, but it had become an ever-harder standard to maintain. Now, it suddenly seemed attainable again.
Some people reading my blog back home noticed the changes.
“Something is happening to you, Alan,” my aunt Carrie Wells e-mailed from Maplewood. “I can feel it pulsing through your writing, and it’s exciting.”
I knew what she meant but didn’t pause to examine it, pushing analysis away and pledging to live in the moment. After almost twenty years as a journalist talking to others, synthesizing their experiences and doing my best to honestly relate their stories, I was now telling my own tale, and the very process of doing so pushed me to keep seeking adventures. This was key because sitting around those compounds is a fatal mistake for a newly arrived expat. In the middle of the day, they become an ocean of ennui in the middle of a vibrant city.